[ManskY]

There has always been a struggle with UX design, people want simplicity but at the same time they want clarity and complexity of ideas. People want great knowledge, but they don't want to read about the nuances that makes it a great knowledge.

There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.

[sitkack]

Please don't blame people for wanting when it is "the design" department that forces these changes on people.

How about people (designers) start thinking about their users and some some strict adherence to someone else's opinion about Material Design. I hope we see Material Design like we see touch screens in vehicles. An embarrassing mistake at best and potentially fatal at worst.

Design should always serve the user. If it doesn't, it needs to go away.

[Kalium]

I think we may be seeing an organizational issue at work. The job of a design department is to produce design. If there isn't enough new stuff to design, they will redesign old stuff. This serves to advance the critical goal to the design department of justifying their continued existence.

The number of designers who will march up to their VP and boldly declare that all the company's apps are just fine and don't need any kind of redesigning is small.

You get a similar thing any time a development team runs out of feature work or actual stress points in an application they maintain. They wind up reworking the thing mainly to have something to do to justify the continued paychecks until the business thinks of an actual reason.

[shaan7]

Combine that with the needs of designers to "make the experience unique" to a level where consistency goes out of the window. Every commercial software these days has its own idea of design and it gets irritatingly hard to learn a new set of usage pattern for each.

Granted, the developer side of the story might happen as well but I'm guessing not that much (all the dev teams I've worked in saw an overloaded pipeline of work so it is very hard for me to imagine otherwise)

[Kalium]

I've seen devs do it while also ignoring an overloaded pipeline of work. Sometimes you manage to get the worst of both worlds.

[saagarjha]

What's wrong with Material Design? By default, I think it shows scrollbars…

[reaperducer]

it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.

We used to achieve this balance with a manual.

A printed manual. Not a URL printed in 3 point Helvetica in light gray on a white background on a tiny leaflet in amongst a dozen similar-looking regulatory leaflets that will all go into the recycling bin when the new shiny shows up.

[toast0]

You can't write a printed manual about how to use the product unless you're pretty sure that's how it works.

Although, you probably still need to print a leaflet with updates between when you sent the manual out and when you finalized the software.

[the_af]

It seems to me these UX changes are almost never driven by what actual users want or need.

[pacifika]

Removing elements from a design to achieve clarity is a workaround for being unable to clarify the design itself.